Nolan's "Inception" is getting stellar reviews across the board. Can't wait. Cracks me up when people say "Hollywood" has lost creativity. "Hollywood" is nothing but thousands of separate artists and business people trying to shake hands. The human race has been here a long, long time. How egotistical for some to think WE just happen to be living in the first generation without ideas. Everything goes in cycles.
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Sleep Yoga
I’ve been getting odd pains in muscles and tendons in the sides of my legs. Yoga or certain kinds of exercise eases it, but it ticks me off and subtracts from the joy of waking up in the morning. So I experimented this morning with actually sleeping (or really, resting) in bed in a Pigeon Pose. Drowsed a while like that. It’s tricky to describe, but if you Google it, you’ll see what I was doing. And it seems to have had a great effect. Hmmm. I wonder if there are other poses I could actually sleep in to positive effect?
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There was some controversy over on Facebook about Wonder Woman and how she no longer wears a flag. Some one called this “America Hate.” Jeeze, that’s a cheapening of the term “hate.” “Hate,” it seems, now means anything other than thinking the world revolves around the object of attention. Why in the world would an Amazon attach specifically to America? There is no real logical sense to it...and it makes sense only in the terms of a comic book iconography. She isn’t Captain America, after all.
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Hey, a question. I forget if I’ve asked this before: Who out there thinks Bin Laden is still alive? I think he’s been dead for about eight years. His “images” don’t seem to have aged a day, and this is a guy on dialysis who is sneaking from cave to cave. He should look like hammered shit. And hasn’t given a single interview to Al Jazeera, which strains credulity. I think he’s dead, we know it but couldn’t produce the body, but everyone likes a boogyman. What do you think?
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The recent discussion of relaxing strictures with Cuba prompted some Senator to complain that this was bad timing, “we have the Castro regime on the ropes.” What? Now...this shouldn’t be a Democrat-Republican or Liberal-Conservative issue, because every administration in fifty years has kept this crap going. And Castro is the longest-running strong man dictator in the world, to my knowledge (I guess he’s semi-retired now.) I mean, if we HADN’T isolated him, how much more successful could he have been? I find it likely that our very isolation of Cuba helped him stay in power, allowed him to blame the “Norte Americanos” for anything in their culture his people disliked. And the fact that we openly do business with China and Russia kinda makes our attitude toward Cuba seem...well, like there’s something else going on there. My favorite conspiracy theory? Castro had something to do with the JFK assassination. We couldn’t make it public without triggering an outcry to invade. And invading Cuba would have triggered a nuclear exchange. That puts us between a rock and a hard place. The available option was to isolate Cuba to “punish” her for whatever role she played, a policy that could never be discussed publicly, but has been maintained by administration after administration...
Hey, don’t tell me someone couldn’t write that book!
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
My Next Book?
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9 comments:
Do I get to hate Wonder Woman's new costume? It's extremely boring and undistinctive, and the whole point of superhero costumes is that they can be recognized at a glance.
Personally, I liked the 'substitute' Wonder Woman that they had for a while. Artemis, wasn't it? The hair on her was the sort you only ever see in comics, and that sort of tickled me. And during that time the 'original', Diana, was running around in a revised getup for a while then, too, not unlike the one she has now. Artists get bored drawing the exact same thing over and over, makes you feel like you're working in a McDonald's, turning out a standard product ad nauseam so that anyone who gets your job once you're gone can do it the same way.
As for Bin Laden--regardless of his actual status, I agree that he's worth more 'alive' than 'dead' to all sorts of players in the game, but I don't claim to understand or follow geopolitical issues like I used to.
History, on the other hand... If you really delve into who would very much have like Kennedy dead, look into who Kennedy would very much have liked to retire. I'll give you a hint... he was the most powerful man in America, and had been for a while, and quite liked it that way. And in fact, said retirement was, I'm told, planned to be enforced sometime around November 25th, 1963. There's a whole lovely story involved there, that a history prof has lovingly detailed for me.
As to Castro... I think the embargo and hard-line stance have a lot more to do with the politics in Miami than they do Moscow or Beijing.
By the way, Steve, it sounds like your IT band is giving you grief. Have you been running or doing something that would stress your legs unusually? One thing I recommend and have gotten good results from is trying out one of those foam roll things for myofascial release. It's stiff medicine the first few times, but it really helps, like getting deep-tissue massage.
Sleeping on the floor (on top of some blankets) might help you wake up with less or no pain.
Or so I've been told.
George Perez' eighties reboot created a good enough rationale for WW's American flag get-up -- in the past, an American flier had crashed on the island and been a hero to the Amazons, so that flier's colors were being honored.
I sort of buy the Hollywood- losing-creativity theme. I started getting that idea from the flood of remakes and bad movies being made from old fifties sitcoms, comic books, and - the worst of the bunch - video games. I just figured that they had to be getting desperate for material. (Underdog? Tomb Raider?)
Lots of people buy the "Hollywood" theme. The problem is that "Hollywood" doesn't exist. It is a fiction. There is an "American film industry" composed of tens of thousands of artists from around the world. And there are cycles, bursts, followed by profit, followed by businesses taking over and becoming more conservative...but there are always new cycles of creativity. This has been going on since stories were first invented.
Steve
About Bin Laden.
I think you're right. I think Special Forces got him and buried him deep in a hole somewhere.
That way the 'Search for Bin Laden' idea can still be used as a rallying cry. Plus saying they got him would give radical islamics a martyr.
From Al Qaedda's POV they probably chose not to announce it so they can keep the cause going (don't forget there are lots of rival factions within Al Qaedda and although his death would have given them a martyr it might also have triggered an internal power struggle).
For all we KNOW ol' Binny boy is @ home with the wife and kids in Saudi Arabia. His mission was accomplished when he attacked our financial heart he knew we would respond by throwing good money after bad and wind up in a rut. he studied us well, and found the chink in the armor, and with the precision of a neurosurgeon he attacked and has been watching the dominoes fall ever since. Do we really think ANY of the Arab nations are looking to turn him in? Please.... We need to admit defeat and pick up the pieces.
He brings to mind Queen Elizabeth, she avoided wars by sabotaging the enemies finances.... maybe our guy's should be studying "The Art of War" instead of whatever they go by, it would sure make things easier for us regular folk's.
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